feeding hungry people

[barbara100 at jps.net]

Funny you should mention that, Doug.  I was thinking pretty much the same
thing last night watching my local and national NBC news broadcasts.  I saw
the same film clips Jbor did, I bet.  The little five-year-old Afghan girl
running 10 miles to get a sackful of the bright yellow packages, carrying
them home on her head. And back at town, other children squeezed foil packs
of peanut butter out onto the ground for lack of a better idea.  I guess it
didn't occur to them to eat it. In another camera shot, some villagers were
feeding the US rations to their donkeys and camels.  It was really quite
comical.  And there was no indication at all that the people of Afghanistan
are really HUNGRY.    Shit,  if they were giving their rations to their
camels, they can't be *that* hungry!  Right?  That's what I would have
gathered from the footage,  if I only relied on them for my news.
I guess I'd have to call this a classic case of media bias.  In all of the
two broadcasts, there wasn't a single mention of the 37,000 US rations a day
accommodating only 1 percent of the country's need (according to a newspaper
report a few days earlier).  They didn't say anything about the roads being
too tore up to and fear among drivers being too high to get the food-truck
convoys going in to supply the country's 1500-tons-a-day need.  No mentions
of the World Food Program's prior efforts and recent hardships.  Nothing
like that at all.  Not even real starving people.  Just tired little village
children, appreciative young men, and peanut-butter licking donkeys.
It was a real feel-good story for the poor saps who suck it up without ever
hearing the other side of the story. For a second there, I was duped into
the feeling America was a benevolent master too.


----- Original Message -----
From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2001 3:02 PM
Subject: feeding hungry people


> 37,000 meals a day for 4 million starving people, offered by the same
> country (the U.S.) that has forced neighboring countries to close their
> borders to refugees and which continues a bombardment that at first
stopped
> altogether and continues to impede the shipment of the necessary amounts
> humanitarian aid -- it's disgraceful to call this a humanitarian gesture.
> Yes the corporate media have made much of this propaganda effort without
> asking many probing questions about it.
>
> I'm sure that American TV won't be showing us the pictures of the kids who
> run into a minefield to get one of those food packets and get blown to
bits
> instead -- and nobody's TV will, if the Bush Administration continues to
> have success in bullying foreign broadcasters to toe its propaganda line.
>
> It remains astonishing to me that anybody could claim to have read and
> understood and sympathize with Pynchon's worldview  and also support --
> celebrate, as some drooling slobs have done on Pynchon-l -- this insane
> military adventure of Bush's, and support this sort of cynical PR ploy
that
> puts a fig leaf on actions that amounts to starving refugees to death
while
> they wait  to be killed -- that's one thing, among others, that supporters
> of Bush's policies are supporting.
>